When my wife and I migrated here from Trinidad many moons ago, we had already traveled to almost every corner of this little blue planet.
Canada was the place we most admired out of all the myriad countries we visited. The scenic beauty was matched by the people’s friendliness; national stability was coupled with honest endeavours to play a difficult leading role of maintaining an honourable peace in troubled parts of our world.
Things have changed so radically since we arrived, especially over the last few years, that Canada is sometimes hardly recognizable as the country we came to proudly call our own.
Just take our nation’s recent belligerent role in the NATO-lead assault to bring about regime change in Libya; the dictator may well be dead, but that country is in total chaos as the first baby-steps of so-called democracy have stumbled into deeper violence in Benghazi.
Thanks to the overt stubbornness of much-maligned then PM Jean Chretien, we didn’t play an overt role in the Iraq War to oust Saddam Hussein.
Surely NATO should have learned a lesson from seeing how drastically things turned out in Baghdad. Now our government cuts all diplomatic ties with Iran, and exudes delight when Israeli President Shimon Perez calls Canada his country’s best friend.
The two prime ministers, Stephen Harper and Benjamin Netanyahu, are forever soul-mates, and seem very much at ease swaying to war drums beating an all-too-familiar tune in the Persian Gulf.
As if all this bellicose war-talk isn’t enough, we have spent $28 million promoting the War of 1812. Like the current brouhaha about a relatively new and member of the royal family getting photographed wearing only her bikini bottoms, this extravagant bicentennial bun-fest seems Much Ado About Nothing.
Bernie Smith
Parksville